The Sisters Grimm, Apple TV’s animated series built on Michael Buckley’s novels, comes back for a second season with a smaller world and a harder question. Sabrina and Daphne Grimm, the sisters voiced by Ariel Winter and Leah Newman, start at a new school in Ferryport Landing, the town where fairy-tale characters live alongside everyone else. The published episode listings end the season on a choice: Sabrina has to decide between saving the Everafters and finally finding her missing parents.

That final choice is the season’s real subject, because it turns the show’s engine against itself. The Grimm girls came to Ferryport Landing because their parents disappeared, and every case they take is, underneath, a step in that search. Season two asks what happens when the search and the town stop pointing in the same direction. For a detective story written for readers between eight and twelve, it is an adult dilemma: the thing you came looking for, or the place you have started to belong to.

From the first book to the second

Buckley wrote nine Sisters Grimm novels, illustrated by Peter Ferguson, and the first season adapted the opening volume, The Fairy-tale Detectives, across six episodes. Apple has not said which book the new season follows, but the episode titles make a strong case. The opener, “Bella”, sends the girls to a new school in the hope of a taste of normal life; the finale is called “Rumpelstiltskin”. Buckley’s second novel, The Unusual Suspects, does the same thing on the page: it enrols the sisters at Ferryport Landing Elementary, and Rumpelstiltskin is the danger it builds toward.

If that reading holds, the series is moving through Buckley at one book per season, which is how television tends to protect a middle-grade adaptation: a season is a novel, a finale is a last chapter. It also means the show inherits the second book’s change of setting. The first novel is about arrival, a grandmother the girls do not trust and a town they refuse to believe in. The second puts them in a classroom, the one place where a child’s secret has to survive other children.

Who the new episodes lean on

The listings also show which characters carry the season. Mayor Charming, voiced by Abubakar Salim, drives two of the six episodes: in “Anansi” he tasks the Grimms with untangling a web of clues, and in “The Pied Piper” he offers Sabrina a gift with real power attached. Puck, voiced by Billy Harris, plays bodyguard for the girls at school in “Charlie”. “Wendell” is named for a character who hands the sisters a new lead. Laraine Newman returns as Granny Relda and Harry Trevaldwyn as the Mirror.

The names say something about the source. Puck comes from Shakespeare, not the Brothers Grimm, and Anansi is the trickster spider of West African and Caribbean storytelling. Buckley’s books were always a mixed shelf, and an episode called “Anansi” keeps that shelf open beyond Europe. The Pied Piper, by contrast, is the one figure on the list with a documented place in German legend: the Hamelin story is among the tales the Grimms themselves collected.

Charming’s offer is the detail worth holding on to. Screen Rant’s review of season one singled out Sabrina’s reluctance to accept the charge of being a Grimm as the show’s one real character arc. Set against that, a gift of power from the town’s mayor reads less like a plot convenience than like a recruitment pitch.

A perfect score on a thin ledger

Season one reaches this return carrying a number Apple likes to repeat: a 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. That aggregate rests on five reviews, and the fuller picture is split. Common Sense Media praised the way the show folds classic fairy tales into a family adventure. Screen Rant’s Abigail Stevens gave it 4 out of 10: she liked the animation and the score, but found that the characters spoke in an awkwardly childish way and that the show’s ideas about identity and destiny were “very surface-level and bluntly addressed”.

For an adaptation, that last complaint is the one that counts. Buckley’s novels carry much of their personality in point of view, in the close, sceptical angle they give Sabrina on a town she will not take at face value. Television has no narrator unless it adds one, so the same attitude has to live in dialogue, and dialogue written for young viewers can flatten into instruction. The second season will be judged less on its fairy-tale guest list than on whether Sabrina gets to sound like the girl on the page.

Apple’s bet on a library-shelf series

Amy Higgins, who is also the showrunner, developed the series with Erica Rothschild. Sage Cotugno is supervising director, the animation comes from Titmouse, the studio behind Big Mouth and The Legend of Vox Machina, and Buckley is an executive producer. The show sits in a pattern streaming has leaned on for years: books a generation read in the school library, handed back to that generation as something to watch with their own children. Disney+ did it with Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Netflix with A Series of Unfortunate Events. Apple’s version is smaller and animated, and it releases each season as a single block rather than weekly, which suits a mystery designed to be watched in an afternoon.

In Buckley’s premise the Grimm family’s job is to keep the Everafters in line, the fairy-tale characters who have outlived their stories and now fill the town. Season two, on the evidence of its own episode list, offers Sabrina the thing she wanted from the start and asks her to pay for it with the town. Whether a detective can keep looking for her parents once she has started to belong somewhere else is not a question six episodes are built to close.

The Sisters Grimm season 2: release date, episodes, cast and where to watch

Season two of The Sisters Grimm premieres globally on Apple TV on Friday, October 2, 2026, with all six episodes available at once; each runs a little over 20 minutes. The six episodes of season one are already on the service. Ariel Winter voices Sabrina and Leah Newman voices Daphne, with Laraine Newman as Relda, Abubakar Salim as Charming, Billy Harris as Puck and Harry Trevaldwyn as the Mirror. Amy Higgins and Erica Rothschild developed the series, Sage Cotugno is supervising director and Titmouse produces the animation. The series is aimed at viewers aged 8 to 12.

Is it based on a book? Yes: Michael Buckley’s nine-novel series The Sisters Grimm, published between 2005 and 2012. Do you need to watch season one first? The new episodes continue the search for the girls’ missing parents that season one began, so the first six episodes are the place to start.